Okay, enough with pictures of puppies. Today it's time for some DATA! In today's edition of Learn Something New Every Day, I bring you: Whitehouse WAVES. (Get ready, there's going to be a lot of text.)
I have been watching humongous amounts of Scandal recently.
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Through Scandal, I found about about the Worker And Visitor Entry System (WAVES) at the White House. So, of course I downloaded the data. It's available
here.
There are some exceptions to what is publicly released (see the note at the bottom if you're interested.) Even so there are 15,664 visits recorded for January 2013, which is plenty of data to start with.
The first thing I took a look at was who visits the White House.
I grabbed a list of the top 20 most common names in the US from the 2010 census. As you would expect, Smith is the most common at just over 0.9% of US last names, followed by Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, etc. Then I compared that to how frequently those same names showed up on the WAVES logs.
You can see that the match was decently strong (r value of 0.96!) Surprisingly, all of the 20 most common last names had a lower representation in visits to the White House than in the US as a whole. The gap was especially pronounced for Hispanic names (Garcia, Rodriguez, Martinez, Hernandez.)
Next, I took a look at the 20 most common last names in the visitor logs, and was surprised yet again.
The correlation went down (to 0.92), and there are a few names that stand out for frequent visits. Nelson, Murphy, and Kelly have between 1.8 and 2.3 times as many visits as you would expect based on the frequency of their names in the United States. The Cohens have over six times as many visits as you would expect.
I looked at the 32 Cohen visits from January to see if there was any overarching theme. The result (at least to my eye) was just a cross section of work going on at the White House.
8 visits by people consulting on Healthcare:
- 6 visits by Mandy K Cohen. 5 of them were to the Office of Public Engagement, and one to Jeanne Lambrew, the Deputy Director of the Office of Health reform. She works for Medicare/Medicaid according to her LinkedIn profile.
- 1 visit by Gary M Cohen, on the Board of UNICEF, to the Jeann same Lambrew.
- 1 visit by Elyse Cohen to Sam Kass, the Executive Director of Let's Move!/Senior Policy Advisor on Nutrition
8 visits related to consulting and/or lobbying (I think):
- 5 visits by John D Cohen, 2 of them with the Vice President listed at the visitee. My guess based a few searches (in particular this and this) is that he's there doing some lobbying about energy policy for his employer Alstom.
- 1 visit by David L Cohen, Executive VP of Comcast to the Vice President.
- 1 visit by Larry Cohen to Maureen Tracey-Mooney, a Senior Policy analyst for the Vice President. If my googling is correct, he's a partner at a law firm and an important member of the Jewish National Fund (Source.)
- 1 visit by "Laurence Cohen" to Tricia Schmitt, also at the OMB. I think this is the same person as above, with the longer (and misspelled) version of his name listed.
8 visits to perform work requested by the White House (I think):
- 2 visits by Nora E Cohen, who works in the Senate Office of the Vice President as "Deputy Director of Advance." What does that even mean? There was also a visit by Nora N Cohen which seems like it was likely meant to be the same person (they visited someone in the Senate Office of the Vice President.)
- 1 visit by Rima J Cohen, Counselor to the Secretary at US Dept HHS to Noelle Lee, Associate Director for Policy and Events.
- 1 visit by Debra H Cohen, who has worked on several campaigns to someone in the Office of Public Engagement.
- 1 visit by Mary L Cohen to Gayle Smith, Senior Director at the NSC.
- 1 visit by Stephen L Cohen (of the SEC?) to Jonathan McBridge, Deputy Director of Presidential Personnel.
9 visits that I don't know how to categorize:
- 2 visits by Ross S Cohen. I don't know who he is. Maybe this guy? I wouldn't bet on it. He visited the Director of Policy for Veterans, Wounded Warriors, and Military Families. and also the Presidential Personnel Office.
- 1 visit by Clark E Cohen and 147 other people to the Presidential Personnel office (Teresa Chaurand.) No idea what this entry is about. That seems like too many people to be arriving for interviews at the same time.
- 1 visit by Emily R Cohen to a Staff Assistant for the Council of Economic Advisors.
- 1 visit by Jeffrey S Cohen to a "Program Examiner" at the OMB.
- 1 visit by Michael Cohen to Steve Robinson, Special Assistant at the White House Domestic Policy Council who has focused on Education.
- 1 visit by Mitchell Cohen to Wylie Alison, Staff Assistant at the Office of Management and Administration.
- 1 visit by Samson F Cohen to Conor McKay, Chief of Staff for the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
- 1 visit by Stepehen H Cohen (I assume this is misspelled) to Rochelle Martinez at the OMB.
Thoughts or commentary from anyone else?
Coming up next: a look at the Super Visitors, with 10 or more visits in January alone.
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*Commentary from Watchdog Labs on redacted data:
- The White House Voluntary Disclosure Policy lists four exceptions for data that would not be released:
- Data fields that “implicate personal privacy or law enforcement concerns” would not be released.
- Records related “to purely personal guest of the first and second families” would not be released.
- Records “related to a small group of particularly sensitive meetings.”
- Because of incompatible systems, information released about visitors to the Vice President’s residence would not be identical to information released about visitors to the White House complex.
- Other records have been redacted, or are missing, for unknown reasons (quotes below are from John Wonderlich, Sunlight Foundation in testimony to House Energy and Commerce Committee, May 3, 2011):
- “Some visitors are clearly missing from the data, despite their being at the White House.”
- “There have been numerous reports of Administration officials scheduling meetings in the White House Conference Center (a space apparently not covered by the WAVES system), or holding meetings with lobbyists in coffee shops and restaurants near the White House.”
